Ontario Genealogical Society. - A better place: death and burial in nineteenth-century Ontario

A Better Place

Susan Smart

A Better Place

Death and Burial in
Nineteenth-Century Ontario

Copyright Susan Smart, 2011

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Editor: Ruth Chernia
Copy Editor: Cheryl Hawley
Design: Jesse Hooper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Smart, Susan

A better place : death and burial in nineteenth-century Ontario / Susan Smart.

Includes bibliographical references.
Issued also in an electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55488-899-3

1. Funeral rites and ceremonies--Ontario--History. 2. Burial--Ontario--History. 3. Cemeteries--Ontario--History. 4. Death--Social aspects--Ontario--History--19th century. I. Title.

GT3213.A3O67 2011 393.109713 C2011-900934-X

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Prologue

Bushman and his companion made all possible haste to the place of the accident.

When they came there a most harrowing sight presented itself to them. There sat Harry, with his chin resting on his knees, completely broken down with his sorrow. Beside him, on the ground, lay his wife, in a paroxysm of grief. Her pitiful moaning was enough to touch the most insensible, and to melt the coldest heart.

Her only cry was, Me babes, me babes. Och, me poor innocent babes.

When John, who could scarcely command himself to speak, asked Harry what had happened, he could only point to the stump and, between his sobs, say, The little dears are under there.

William, or Billy as he was usually called, was the only one that could give any information on the matter. With the help of what he said, John soon understood the facts of the case, which were as follows:

An elm tree, some two feet across, had been turned up by the roots in a recent gale. As is frequently the case with that kind of timber, a large amount of earth clung to the roots, thus making a big hollow under the overhanging roots, some of which still held on to the ground, and formed a sort of canopy or covering. Under this the children were playing, it seems, while their father and his man were chopping up the fallen tree.

Harry was cutting the tree off some three feet from the ground. For want of experience in the matter, he did not understand the danger that his children were in. When he severed the connection between the stump and the tree, the weight of earth, and the spring of the unbroken and elastic roots, caused the stump to rise to an upright position, and fill up the hole, burying the poor children under a couple of tons of earth and wood. One pitiful scream was all that was heard of them, then everything was still.

The alarm was given to all the neighbors, and men turned out to help in getting the bodies of the children out of the place. But it was only after the roots had been cut away and two yoke of oxen hitched to it that the stump could be removed. Then the earth was carefully lifted until the crushed and broken remains of the poor children were found lying close together, with their playthings still clenched in their hands. Strong arms and ready hands tenderly removed the mangled little forms, and laid them on a pile of leaves, hastily scraped together for a couch. Around those lifeless children strong men were standing. But every face was wet with tears. Brave hearts were there, but not one heart so hard as to be unmoved by the sad and touching scene that was there witnessed.

Poor Bridget had been led to the house by the sympathizing women. But at times her cries could be heard. Harry still sat upon the ground crushed by the weight of sorrow that had fallen upon his household. When the children were laid on the impromptu bed provided for them, he got up and stood over them, with the great tear drops falling from his manly face upon the pale upturned faces of his two dead babies. At last he broke the silence, saying:

Oh me babes, me babes, me poor dear babes! Was it for this that I brought yez away from the green fields of dear Ould Ireland? Was it for this that meself and your poor mother have wrought so hard, and lived so cheap to try and get a house for yez?

With slow and solemn steps the little morsels of mangled mortality were carried to the house from which they had so lately come full of life and childish glee.

Two days after the accident the first funeral procession that was ever seen in the Riverbend settlement moved silently from the house of Harry and Bridget Hawthorn to a grave on the banks of Catfish River, near where it crossed over the boundary of Harrys land and went on to John Bushmans.

A sudden and unexpected death, in any community, brings into view some of the grandest elements of our human brotherhood, as nothing else can do it. Though neither priest nor parson could be had, yet these children were not buried without religious service. Protestant and Catholic forgot their differences as they stood around this open grave and joined in the service, while Mr. Woodbine read from John Bushmans Book of Discipline the ritual of the funeral service as it was used by the Methodist Church of that day. The death of the Hawthorn children was an event long remembered in the settlement.

from Among the Forest Trees, or, How the Bushman Family Got Their Homes: Being a Book of Facts and Incidents of Pioneer Life in Upper Canada, Arranged in the Form of a Story . By the Reverend Joseph H. Hilts (Toronto: William Briggs, 1888), 28386. Available on Internet Archive, www.archive.org .

PART I

Death and Burial

Introduction

D EATH IS A FASCINATING SUBJECT . We will all face it one day and we wonder how it will be for us not only how the physical death will happen but also how our deaths will be handled by others.

Burial rituals are important to help those left behind cope with the loss of a loved one and to enable them to carry on and lead a normal life again. My own mothers funeral rites were very different from the rites surrounding her mothers burial thirty years earlier. How different then would burial rites have been a hundred and fifty years ago? Thoughts such as these led to the writing of this book.